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She won five Grammys and married Blake Fielder-Civil, the boyfriend who had introduced her to crack cocaine. With the 2006 detonation of “Rehab” and the “Back to Black” album, Winehouse ascended to music-industry heaven and tabloid hell. If all you know of Winehouse is “Rehab” and the car-wreck of her life, the performance sequences in “Amy” have the power to convert you to a freshly mourning fan. Winehouse was an untrained singer but not an undisciplined one - not until the drugs took hold - and she shared with artists like Judy Garland, Janis Joplin, and Barbra Streisand an ability to channel volcanic emotions without ever quite losing control, the vibrato wobbling but refusing to spill over the top. The film’s midsection, in which Winehouse secures a record contract, records 2003’s “Frank,” and embarks on tours and televised performances, makes the case for her talent, which was immense and unique. “My alibi for taking your guy / History repeats itself, it fails to die / Animal aggression is my downfall / I don’t care about what you got, I want it all.” Those lines from “What Is It About Men?” read strikingly enough on the page, but to hear them cascade from Winehouse’s soul is to bear witness to a life-consuming force. Initially, she made do with covers of her beloved jazz singers and ’50s crooners, but when Shymansky suggested she write her own songs, her neo-soul turned into something very modern and close to the bone. Kapadia discreetly time-stamps each scene so we can chart the long slope up and down, and he lets Winehouse’s lyrics, stretched and slurred in performance, unfurl in graceful script across the screen. Shymansky, who met Winehouse when he was 19 and she was 16, toted a videocamera everywhere in those days, and the early sequences of “Amy” are heartbreaking in the way they capture a lumpy, stroppy North London girl who just about bursts into flame when she opens her mouth to sing.
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Aside from Bey, though, the interviews are conducted primarily off-camera, so the singer is allowed to take center screen as she morphs from meteoric talent to supernova to dark star. Kapadia, who made the excellent 2010 race-car bio-doc, “Senna,” interviews plenty who were there, from Winehouse’s loyal childhood chums Juliette Ashby and Lauren Gilbert and her first manager and close friend Nick Shymansky to the singer’s father, Mitch Winehouse, to music industry friends such as Yasiin Bey (better known as Mos Def) and Winehouse’s fatherly bodyguard, Andrew Morris. “Amy” doesn’t depart from the standard behind-the-music template, but it does deepen the format immeasurably, through the intimacy of its archival materials and the focus of its approach. She’s gaunt, hollow-eyed, a wreck one of the most famous people on the planet when the photos were taken, she seems almost existentially alone. Toward the end of “Amy,” Asif Kapadia’s devastatingly sad documentary on the life of neo-soul singer Amy Winehouse, the screen flashes a succession of images taken by Winehouse late at night in front of her computer. Amy Winehouse in concert in Asif Kapadia’s documentary.